This Week: Texas textbooks (again), Masculinity in crisis, & more

TPM: “One parent said she read through a section of her son’s history book and found four pages on Islam and only one reference to the Bible. Asked by a board member what the section was titled, she replied, ‘Life in the Eastern Hemisphere.'”

New York Times: “Here in the state of Guanajuato, where Roman Catholic conservatives have controlled government for more than 15 years, it is standard procedure to investigate suspected cases of abortion. But Guanajuato is no anomaly, women’s rights advocates and some health officials say, since a broad move to enforce antiabortion laws has gained momentum in other parts of Mexico.”

Womanist Musings: “By this standard, by virtue of their weight, any fat Black woman would be understood as a mammy regardless of her political understanding of how race and gender functions to effect her life’s chances. What we cannot escape, no matter how post racial we claim our society is, are the categories of: mammy, jezebel, and sapphire. This is not because these categories have any basis in reality, but because Whiteness is pervasive. These simplistic categories are meant to demean and debase Black womanhood.”

Style Rookie: “Now everything is justified by the attention this blog receives, the same way I dislike the logo placement on my Miu Miu collar, as if it makes the oddness somehow okay. My goal for this school year was to wear outfits that confuse the people I’m surrounded by every day, challenge beauty ideals…I know it’s cheesy to post inspiration quotes, but these are not the kind you will see pasted onto a photo of a sunset and tumbled.”

Washington Post: “Her supporters never said that Lewis was innocent or that she shouldn’t be punished. But they said she did not deserve to die because she was borderline mentally retarded, with the intellectual ability of about a 13-year-old, and was manipulated by a smarter conspirator. It was wrong for her to be sentenced to death, they said, when the two men who fired the shots received life terms.”

The Atlantic Wire: In a Newsweek cover story that builds on Hanna Rosin’s Atlantic article “The End of Men,”Andrew Romano and Tony Dokoupil examine whether masculinity needs to be reimagined to cope with the demands of the 21st century. With a cover that loudly proclaims “Man Up!” and a subheading explaining that men need to embrace “girly jobs,” the article has received a fair amount of buzz from critics who’d like to take the writers to task on their central thesis. Here’s what the Newsweek writers are asserting and how pundits are reacting to the argument…